I've Been Grading the Wrong Thing for Years

Traditionally, when we think about grading, most of the time teachers think of the finished project, the finished work, not the notes or the unformed ideas but the polished version that we can hang up on the walls, send over to parents, and the thing which we will show our admin and coaches when they ask for samples of our students’ work. However, while that gets a lot of attention, not necessarily unjustifiably, I realized that that is actually far less important now, especially in an era of AI-assisted work, and for years I had missed the single most important thing that I should be focusing on when it comes to grading my students’ work. Not the end product, but the entire process, and nothing is more important to establish that baseline than the draft itself.

Process is the last of the five pillars of an AI-resistant assessment. After presence, production, personalization, and permutation, we arrive at the final cornerstone: process. Process is the visible growth over time, the change that naturally occurs as a student’s work is introduced to more ideas, greater refinement, repeated revisions, teacher input, peer observations. Simply put, it is the documented struggle to produce their work. It is the thinking over time, the corrections, the revisions, the moments where ideas change, improve, or are abandoned altogether. And the most important part of that by far is that first rough draft of whatever it is they are doing. In an AI world, the final product is no longer proof of learning. The process is proof of learning.

The raw, misshapen ideas from my students are possibly the single most important baseline when it comes to making an AI-resistant assessment, especially one that is going to be a long-form project that will take place over several weeks or months. Depending on your subject this can always look different. Perhaps it looks like them writing down some notes, jotting down an idea, everything out of order, everything jumbled, the mathematics all looking quite unkempt or the ELA thoughts scattered across the pages and occasionally interspersed with various doodles and drawings. But this serves as a fantastic baseline. This is the raw creative thought of your students. This is what they think, this is what we have, this is what they are before a single piece of technology is added in. Essentially, you are looking at the unfiltered view of your students’ ideas concerning the academic topic at hand. Using this then as the baseline and as your canon, you can judge all future work that they do against that first rough draft. The first rough draft is most likely to be the thing that holds the greatest amount of their own personal voice because it is the one thing that was made in front of you before any computer, phone, peer, or parent became involved in the process.

Let me walk you through an example of how I used process in my class and how I teach my students, and feel free to let me know if you are doing something different, better, or whether you think I have absolutely gone off my rocker. In my class, the process always begins by having students pull out their physical writing notebooks and a pencil as I introduce the project topic. Years ago, the project was a photographic analysis of historical photos from the Great Depression. I put the photograph up on the board and I would tell the students, “We are not trying to figure anything out yet. We are just making observations. What do you see?”

Then the room would start slowly at first and then pick up.

“I see kids sitting at a table.”

“Their clothes look ripped.”

“There’s not much food.”

“There’s a man standing but he doesn’t have a plate.”

“The house looks really dirty and the walls are rough boards.”

“There’s a Christmas sign on the wall.”

I would stop them there giving them time those observations and say, “Good. Those are great observations. Now we move to questions. Based on what you see, what questions do you have?”

“Why are their clothes ripped?”

“Why is there so little food?”

“Why doesn’t the dad have a plate?”

“Why does the house look like that?”

“If it’s Christmas why don’t they have more food?”

Then we move to inferences, where students begin trying to answer their own questions.

“They might be poor.”

“Maybe they don’t have much money.”

“Maybe they live on a farm since the man is wearing overalls.”

And then one student put the entire inference together and answered almost all of the questions at once. The student said something along the lines of, “If this is Christmas then this is probably their best food and their best clothes, then that means they must be really poor if that's the best food they can make for Christmas and the best clothes that they can wear for the holiday and the dad might not be eating so the kids can eat more for Christmas. And if the house looks like that and they don’t have food then this might be during the Dust Bowl and they might be farmers, which would explain why they don’t have money or food since the crops failed.” And you could see the moment where the class started to understand not just what they were looking at, but what it meant, they were emotionally moved because they were involved in the process. Not just a process of written work so I can see it but a process of exploring a historical topic and learning to see it through the eyes of those who lived it. That one student had taken the observations, answered the questions, and combined the inferences into one larger idea that explained the entire photograph.

Now here is where the accessible process came in. All of those observations, all of those questions, all of those inferences, and that one student’s big idea tying everything together were written down in their notebooks. Those messy notes, those half sentences, those arrows and circles and crossed-out ideas, that was the real work. That was the thinking. Later, when they were asked to turn those notes into an essay, they were not starting from nothing. They were organizing thinking that had already happened. They were turning messy thinking into organized writing.

This process itself is gradable. While I was originally interested in the final product of that assignment, you know the pretty part, was most important but my thinking shifted as I realized looking at the draft I could see their initial thoughts, their initial reactions. I could then judge places where input was added, or in some cases where AI was used. In short, that first draft is gold. The one done in front of you, the one done on paper, the one that you are 100% sure had no assistance from a machine or from a person. So I also began to grade those notes nearly as highly as the finished product itself, and the closer a student was able to keep to the original notes, even if it was refined and improved upon, the more I could be sure that their voice was preserved through the entire process. The more I could observe the process from start to finish, the more I was certain that the student had actually learned something, because they were showing and demonstrating their thinking over time and across different mediums. That is the power of process, and that is when I realized I had been grading the wrong thing for years. Focusing on a finished product, I had missed that that very first doodle-filled draft paper, barely legible, was actually one of the most valuable parts of any assessment. The final draft might be the prettiest thing they produce, and the process itself is exceptionally valuable, I spent years grading final drafts when I should have been grading thinking, because the final draft shows what a student produced, but the process and the first draft show how a student thinks, and in the end, teaching my students how to be critical thinkers is what I was supposed to teach all along.